MyHeritage Acquires FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com to Enter US Market

MyHeritage, which claims to be the most popular family network on the web, has acquirited FamilyLink.com, Inc., maker of the family history content sites FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com. This is MyHeritage's seventh and largest acquisition since 2007.

MyHeritage’s 'Smart Matching' technology empowers users to find relatives and explore their family history. With all family information stored in a secure site, MyHeritage enables users to place and share family photos, and celebrate and preserve special family moments. The company is backed by Accel Partners and Index Ventures, the investors of Facebook and Skype.

FamilyLink.com and WorldVitalRecords.com are subscription services which provide access to a huge database of historical content, covering several billion individuals within census, birth, marriage and death records, as well as the web’s largest archive of historical newspapers. This content will soon be accessible to the 60 million people who have signed up on MyHeritage in 38 different languages, creating more than 900 million profiles in 21 million family trees.

When brought together under the MyHeritage umbrella, the company’s innovative 'Smart Matching' technology will automatically match any of the new historical data to the relevant users' ancestors and relatives within the family trees.

MyHeritage is offering discounts on membership of the acquired resources, but it remains to be seen if this will result in discounted membership for the combined companies, which would be welcomed by researchers hard pressed in the current economic climate.